Census worker lynching details emerge

September 26, 2009 · Posted in News and Current Affairs 
Disturbing details emerge in death of part-time Census worker Bill Sparkman.

Disturbing details emerge in death of part-time Census worker Bill Sparkman.

Despite authorities trying to throw the media off the “lynching” line of reasoning, the more you learn about Bill Sparkman’s death, the more it looks like precisely that. An enterprising AP reporter has turned up a witness; an Ohio man who claims to have discovered Sparkman’s body:

A part-time U.S. Census worker discovered with a rope around his neck and tied to a tree in a Daniel Boone National Forest cemetery two weeks ago was naked, with his hands and feet bound with duct tape, an Ohio man who found him said Friday.

Jerry Weaver of Fairfield, Ohio, told The Associated Press that he was with a group of relatives looking at family gravesites when they discovered the body of Bill Sparkman, 51, on Sept. 12.

“The only thing he had on was a pair of socks,” Weaver said. “And they had duct taped his hands, his wrists. He had duct tape over his eyes, and they gagged him with a red rag or something.”

The Clay County coroner, Jim Trosper, confirmed Friday that the word “Fed” was written on Sparkman’s chest with what appeared to have been a felt-tipped pen.

And in case you, like me, find it suspicious that someone just happened to be hanging out in a remote area of a vast, wild, national park, Weaver had more to say:

Weaver, who works for a family topsoil business in Fairfield, said he was in town for a family reunion and was visiting gravesites at a cemetery in the forest when he and relatives came across Sparkman’s body.

Weaver said “they even had duct tape around his neck.”

“And they had like his identification tag on his neck,” he said. “They had it duct-taped to the side of his neck, on the right side, almost on his right shoulder.”

Weaver said he couldn’t tell if the tag was a Census Bureau I.D. He said he didn’t get close enough to read it.

And while the authorities are still pretending they’re not sure this was a homicide, the rest of us are taking note of attempts by some people to pass the death off as related to volatile meth dealers Sparkman may have stumbled on in the park (a theory the 9/12ers are desperately clinging to.) But Sparkman’s car and computer were found nearby, along with exactly zero houses to canvas, begging the question of what he could possibly have been doing wandering around Daniel Boone National Park, such that he could just happen to stumble on some dealer’s weed stash. And as this astute blogger points out, secretive drug dealers and gratuitous displays of anti-government extremism don’t exactly mix:

If Sparkman was murdered, whoever killed him committed an act of political violence. It doesn’t matter whether the killer was also trying to protect a drug operation. The perp took a page out of the old fashioned lynching playbook–stringing up the victim and defacing his corpse as a warning to others.

Clearly, whoever did this wanted to send a message. Someone who simply wanted to conceal a drug operation wouldn’t dispose of the victim’s body in such a spectacular fashion.

Good point. I suppose you could stretch things to say the “drug dealers” wanted to send a message to the feds to stay out of the national park, or away from them, but it seems to stand to better reason that killing someone in such a grotesque manner would only draw federal law enforcement closer… Meanwhile, Mr. Weaver has no doubt about what he saw:

“He was murdered,” he said. “There’s no doubt.”

Weaver said the body was about 50 yards from a 2003 Chevrolet S-10 pickup truck. He said Sparkman’s clothes were in the bed of the truck.

“His tailgate was down,” Weaver said. “I thought he could have been killed somewhere else and brought there and hanged up for display, or they actually could have killed him right there. It was a bad, bad scene.”

“It took me three or four good nights to sleep. My 20-year-old daughter ended up sleeping in the floor in our bedroom.” he said.

As Rachel Maddow said tonight on her show, you get the feeling the authorities know a lot more than they’re telling …

Meanwhile, ThinkProgress plays the Michelle “Crazy” Bachman card:

Earlier this summer, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) waged a high-profile, wildly-dishonest campaign against the Census. The Minnesota congresswoman said she was so worried about the threat of the government asking “very intricate questions” and collecting information that she would illegally refuse to fill out the form. “They will be in charge of going door to door and collecting data from the American public,” she said. “This is very concerning.” She repeatedly used inflammatory and fear-mongering rhetoric against the Census:

– “I think there is a point when you say enough is enough to government intrusion.” [6/25/09]

– “If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the census bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations, at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps.” [6/25/09]

“You will receive approximately six contacts from them [Census workers], either through phone calls or they will knock on your door. If you still do not give them the information, they said they’ll contact your neighbor to the left of you, to the right of you to get information.” [6/25/09]

Well, she did say it … of course, it’s too early to conclude that a person of Bachman-like Census paranoia is responsible for Mr. Sparkman’s death, but as I said before, I wouldn’t exactly be surprised.

Keep track of this story with the ReidBlog Bill Sparkman page.

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Comments

One Response to “Census worker lynching details emerge”

  1. cb on September 26th, 2009 9:40 am

    Unfortunate last photo of the man.

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